* * *
The necklace lay on the vanity table, a silent accusation in the pale morning light. Julia hadn't moved it. She hadn't dared touch it after the initial shock. She had spent the rest of the night in the armchair by the dying fire, watching the silver glimmer in the candlelight, listening to the ancient house sigh around her. Sleep had been impossible. Every creak of the floorboards above, every distant groan of the wind, felt like something moving in the shadows. Finch's words – *"The house is not used to guests… It forgets itself."* – echoed in her mind. And the music box behind the locked door. Marian's music box.
She felt hollowed out. Exhausted, but wired with a frantic energy. The grey dawn finally seeped through the heavy curtains, painting the room in muted, lifeless tones. The candles guttered out one by one. The necklace remained.
By the time a soft tap came at her door – a young maid, not Agnes or Finch, with a tray bearing weak tea and dry toast – Julia felt like a ghost herself. Her head throbbed, a dull, persistent ache behind her eyes. The room felt colder than it should have, the chill seeming to originate from within the walls themselves.
She dressed quickly in the simple dark clothes she had brought. Duty called. Alistair wanted her to begin cataloguing Marian's collection. It was a task, a purpose. Something concrete to cling to in this place of shadows and whispers.
Finding Marian's study wasn't easy. The house was a maze. She wandered the corridors, the architecture confusingly similar, until she finally found a door that felt right. It was ajar.
She stepped inside.
This room was smaller than the drawing room, designed for work. A large desk sat in the center, covered with papers. Bookshelves lined the walls, packed tightly with volumes on art history, poetry, and obscure folklore. It should have felt like Marian. This was where she spent her days.
But it felt… empty.
Too clean. Too deliberate.
Everything on the desk was neatly arranged. Papers stacked squarely. Pens aligned. There were no little personal touches. No stray bits of ribbon, no half-finished embroidery, no scattered sketches Marian often left lying about. No perfume bottles. No trinkets. No sign of recent life, of a mind at work. It looked curated, like a room prepared for viewing, not a space that had been lived in intensely just weeks before.
Julia's gaze fell on a large, leather-bound book open on the desk. Marian's art catalogue. She approached it carefully. The pages were crisp, the ink precise. Marian's familiar handwriting.
She read the last entry. It described a small Pre-Raphaelite sketch Alistair's family owned. The description stopped mid-sentence. An unfinished thought, cut short. Like Marian herself.
Julia ran a finger over the list of items in the catalogue. She flipped back through pages Marian had completed. And then she noticed it. The catalogue was extensive, but not complete. There were sections left blank, items listed but not described, and others that seemed to be missing entirely from the inventory. Items she knew Marian had acquired recently. A set of antique silver miniatures. A collection of rare shells. Where were they? Had they been moved? Or were they simply… gone?
Alistair had said she was here to catalogue the collection. But it seemed the collection itself was a puzzle.
Julia moved around the study, her footsteps quiet on the rug. She felt the prickle again, the familiar sensation of being watched. Was it Agnes? Finch? Or just the house? She glanced over her shoulder, but saw only the silent bookshelves, the shadowed corners.
Her headache intensified. The air in the study felt strangely cool, despite the lack of drafts. Another pocket of cold air, like the ones she'd felt the night before in the hall.
She walked towards a corner of the room, where a tall, heavy velvet curtain hung, covering the wall from ceiling to floor. It seemed odd. There was no window there. What was behind it?
Drawn by a sudden, inexplicable curiosity, and perhaps a faint, cool draft she felt emanating from that corner, Julia reached out and grasped the edge of the curtain. The velvet was thick, dusty under her fingers.
She pulled it back slowly.
Behind the curtain was not a wall, but a mirror. A full-length dressing mirror set in a dark, ornate wooden frame.
But it was shattered.
The glass was cracked and broken into a thousand fragments, like a spiderweb frozen in time. Most of the pieces had fallen away, leaving empty gaps. Only one large shard remained in the frame, a jagged, dark piece of glass reflecting the dim light of the room.
Julia stared at the destruction. Who would do this? Why? It was a violence that felt out of place in the carefully ordered study.
She stepped closer to the shattered mirror, drawn to the single remaining shard. She leaned in, looking at her own reflection in the fractured glass. Her face was pale, her eyes dark and wide with fatigue and fear.
And then, for a breathless second, she saw her.
Not her own reflection.
Marian.
Standing directly behind Julia in the mirror's reflection. Her face was pale, half-hidden in shadow, framed by dark, dishevelled hair. Her lips were parted, pulled back in a silent scream, a look of absolute terror in her eyes.
Julia gasped, whirling around, her heart leaping into her throat.
Nothing.
The room was empty. Only the silent furniture, the heavy curtains, the open catalogue on the desk. No one was there. No one at all.
She spun back to the mirror, her breath coming in ragged gasps. The shard of glass remained in the frame.
And as she watched, a new crack appeared on the surface of the shard. Starting from the edge, it snaked its way across the glass, straight down the middle, dividing her own reflection in two.
It was impossible. The glass hadn't been touched. Yet, it had cracked.
Julia backed away from the mirror, her hands pressed to her mouth, stifling a cry. The vision… it had felt so real. Marian's terror. Her eyes…
Was she losing her mind? Was the house doing this? Or was that truly Marian?
A sudden sound made her jump. The door to the study opened.
A woman stood there, framed in the doorway. She was middle-aged, plump, wearing a dark dress and several small, tarnished mourning brooches pinned to her bodice. Her face was round, anxious, her eyes darting nervously.
It was Mrs. Keene, the part-time maid. Julia remembered seeing her briefly during her previous visits with Marian, always quiet, seemingly nervous.
Mrs. Keene took a step into the room, then stopped abruptly. Her eyes fixed on the uncovered, shattered mirror in the corner. She gasped, a soft, choked sound.
"Oh, blessed saints," she whispered, her face paling further. She clutched a cleaning rag tightly in her hand. "The mirror."
Julia, still trembling, found her voice. "You… you know about it?"
Mrs. Keene wouldn't step closer. She kept her distance, her gaze fixed on the shattered glass. "We're not meant to look into that one," she mumbled, almost to herself. She shifted nervously on her feet. "It never shows what's true."
"What do you mean?" Julia pressed. "Why is it hidden? Why is it broken?"
Mrs. Keene wrung her rag. She glanced around the room, her eyes wide, as if expecting something to appear. She lowered her voice, speaking in a rushed, fearful tone. "She broke it herself. Madam Marian. The day before… before she stopped speaking."
Julia froze. Alistair had said Marian stopped speaking. Mrs. Keene said she broke the mirror the day before. Was there a connection? A final act of desperation? And what had Mrs. Keene seen?
"Why did she break it?" Julia asked, her voice low.
Mrs. Keene shook her head, her eyes squeezed shut for a moment. "She said… she said it wasn't showing her… her own face anymore." She shuddered. "Said someone else was looking out. Someone wicked."
Someone else was looking out. The terror in the reflection she had just seen…
Mrs. Keene opened her eyes, her gaze meeting Julia's. There was a deep, superstitious fear in them. "This house… it's hungry," she whispered. "Takes things. Changes things." She glanced at the mirror again, then back at Julia, a look of pity mixing with the fear. "Be careful, madam. That glass… it shows you what wants you."
She backed away slowly towards the door, still clutching her rag. "I… I can't clean in here today, madam. Not with that uncovered. It's bad luck." She didn't wait for Julia to reply. She turned and hurried out of the study, leaving Julia alone again with the shattered mirror, the carefully ordered desk, and the overwhelming sense that Marian's unraveling, her terror, was still very much present in this room. And in the house.
Julia looked back at the mirror shard. Her reflection stared back, fractured. Her head pounded. The cold seemed to deepen in the room. Mrs. Keene's words, Alistair's words about Marian's silence, Agnes's warnings, the music box, the necklace… it was all converging. Blackwood Hall was not just old and decaying. It was alive. And it remembered. And perhaps, it was trying to show Julia something about Marian's last days. Something terrifying.